A Sincere Welcome to the G20 Protestors

International politicians, finance ministers, and bankers are gathering this week for a G20 meeting in London. And since no gathering of G-anything is complete without a colorful mob of professional protestors, events across the pond are sure to provide some high drama and lively entertainment for the next few days.

Demonstrators this year fall into three main categories. First, there’s the anti-capitalists and anarchists comprising the “G20 Meltdown.” They will be sponsoring the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” marches, a name which opens all kinds of creative possibilities for the giant papier-mache puppets we’re sure to see hoisted through the streets of London.

The second category is the global warmists, led by the Camp for Climate Action. According to Sky News, the group instructed its activists, "Bring a pop-up tent if you’ve got one, sleeping bag, wind turbine, mobile cinema, action plans and ideas…"

It’s unclear, however, how many of their followers actually possess their own personal wind turbine, and whether or not they’ll be marching alongside others carrying their own electricity grids.

The final participants are the anti-war protestors. This batch is led by the Stop the War Coalition, which opposes U.S. foreign policy and lobbies against nuclear weapons. Their cause has lost a bit of steam now that the situation in Iraq is stabilizing and a leftwinger was elected to preside over the U.S. imperialist effort. As a result, it seems that a good number of these devotees have moved into the global warmist camp, which has continued to metastasize while valiantly ignoring the fact that the globe hasn’t gotten any warmer for at least a decade.

Personally, I applaud the efforts of these protestors to bring public attention to the many rank injustices that plague the world today. In particular, I look forward to their energetic protests on the following issues:

1. Racism

Public expressions of racism must be vehemently confronted and condemned. That’s why I expect to see the most vociferous protests against Brazil, a G20 member whose president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently blamed the global economic crisis on “white people with blue eyes,” a tiny minority so oppressed that they don’t have a single organization dedicated to countering discrimination against them. As a blue-eyed white myself, I’d like to see my brown-eyed brothers on the streets of London stand in solidarity against this ugly outburst of blue-eye-ophobia. How long before Lula targets the left-handed or other disadvantaged genetic minorities?

2. The expanding powers of the state

Although he’s only been in office a few months, President Obama has already drastically expanded the powers of the U.S. government, which now apparently controls the warrantee on my Oldsmobile, and he’s bent on further state encroachments into health care, energy, and other major sectors. The anarchists, I expect, are not going to take this lying down. They are fundamentally opposed to all government. They will surely protest the expansion of state power under Obama, since their silence would imply that they’re just garden-variety leftwing opportunists and not the high-minded, philosophically consistent anarchists we all know them to be.

3. Freedom of speech

The U.N. Human Rights Council recently passed a resolution urging all governments to ban the “defamation of religions.” Granted, everyone knows that this measure, conceived and lobbied for by the UN’s Islamic bloc, is geared at outlawing criticism of Islam. But to get it approved, Islamic countries had to incorporate all religions, which presumably includes Christianity. And where would the left be if it could no longer condemn Christianity? This single resolution threatens to shut down both the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, make criminals out of thousands of American academics, and throw legions of Hollywood screenwriters out of work alongside Bill Maher.

4. Women’s rights

Saudi Arabia is part of the G20, and King Abdullah will be in London for the meeting. This might be a good time to lobby for a radical expansion of women’s rights in the desert kingdom — like allowing them to drive a car, or widening the eye slits in their burqas.

5. Nuclear weapons

The Stop the War Coalition claims to oppose the spread of nuclear weapons, so I’m sure we’ll see a major demonstration against Iran’s feverish attempt to develop nukes. Since Iran’s president has already threatened to wipe another nation off the face of the Earth, I’m confident the Stop the War Coalition will use this opportunity to demonstrate that they’re really against all nukes, and not just using the issue to obscure an agenda comprised solely of anti-Americanism.

6. Over-taxation of the poor

Obama has insisted that no family making under $250,000 will pay “any form of tax increase.” Yet Obama has signed into law the biggest ever federal increase on cigarette taxes. Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that your average smoker is not as rich as Obama, himself a smoker who is comfortably above the $250,000 threshold. So the G20 protestors have a nice target here in Obama’s hypocrisy. What’s more, if you’ve ever been to these kinds of protests, you know that the anti-capitalists and anarchists tend to be big smokers, so they have a personal stake in the issue. True, protesting the tobacco tax may alienate the global warmists, who don’t seem to favor burning tobacco or anything else. But this is a high point of principle, and as indicated above, anarchists are very principled people.

So let’s all wish our excitable, protesting friends well as they dress up in funny costumes, attack inanimate objects like store windows, and otherwise beclown themselves in their noble fight to make this a better world. Good luck, my friends, in burying once and for all the misguided perception that you’re just a collection of anti-rational, anti-Western social misfits who make common cause with dictators, Islamic fundamentalists, and racists.